Is "healthy food" so expensive?

Nicole Darmon works as an Engineer in the Human Nutrition Research Unit of the INSERM (French National Research Institute of Health and Medicine) and the INRA (National Research Institute on Agronomy) in Marseille, France.

She holds an Engineering Degree in Industrial Food Biochemistry and a Ph.D. degree in Human Nutrition. She has conducted nutritional surveys in vulnerable populations, such as homeless and food aid recipients and she has developed a new approach based on diet modelling to study the feasibility and the cost of nutritional recommendations.

She has gained international recognition for her innovative work on the impact of economic constraints on food choices. She is currently developing new tools for increasing the quality of individual diets and for evaluating the nutritional quality of individual foods, based on both diet optimization and nutrient profiling approaches.

Nicole Darmon has published over 40 papers in international nutrition and public health journals. She is doing lecturing for schools of Agriculture and Food Industry Engineering and for Public Health and Nutrition Departments of Universities. She has been involved in the definition of public health programmes such as the French National Programme for Nutrition and Health and the French Food Security Programme, and in the definition of the French Nutritional Recommendations and the recommendations for school meals in France.

She is a member of scientific and technical expert committees for the AFSSA (French Agency for Food Safety), the CNA (National Food Council) and the IFN (French Institute for Nutrition). She has received grants from the French Ministry of Health, the French National Research Agency and from the French Institute for Health Education and Prevention.

She is involved in the Euro-Prevob project, aimed at tackling the socioeconomic determinants of obesity and at developing tools to assist obesity policy analysis in Europe.